A Climbing Betty's journey to find love & strength in the mountains

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We finally had our first freeze over the weekend. Snow flurries reportedly fell in the area too. By Monday, my Facebook feed was full of photos and videos of folks hitting the opening day of Killington (the earliest resort to open in the entire country) or backcountry stashes across the far north. And yesterday, the Black Dyke on Cannon Cliff saw its first ascent- the unofficial start of winter in the northeast. (Congrats by the way to Majka & Alexa! Not only did they grab the first ascent this year, but I believe they are the first all women’s team to grab the first ascent of the season.) Then today, the high temps topped out above 70. It was a gorgeous day for fall rock climbing.

And I just mopped.

For one, I’m just getting over being sick, so I am way behind in work. (Not to mention that pesky illness ruined my plans to attend this year’s climbing film fest). But very soon, it will be November. And quite frankly, I hate November.

November is part of the dreaded ‘shoulder season.’ Too cold to rock climb, not quite cold enough and not enough snow for skiing. Around Halloween, I put the rock climbing gear away and take up waiting for snow and the start of ski season with the eagerness that would rival a child waiting for the arrival of Santa. It’s usually a long dreary wait that often exceeds my thin reserves of patience.

The other shoulder season is in the spring. But at least April has the decency to yield amazing backcountry corn harvests if you are willing to trek for them. Most Aprils, I put the skis away one weekend, grab out the gear and start rock climbing again the next.

But not November. Oh no, not November.

November is just 4 dreary, dread-filled weeks of nothing but watching the days get ridiculous short.

November makes me cranky. Surly, even.

And this year its worse. Because this year, it started a month early.

Owing to the time away I’ve taken away to look after my husband in the wake of his accident and subsequent rehab, I’ve hardly climbed in the last couple of months. I started off the season on such a strong note- I had high hopes for making a lot of progress. In the end, I don’t think I’ve completed a single “goal” climb this season. Starting next season with the same goals as this one is kind of depressing and hasn’t left me interested in making the most of the what’s left of the season. In fact, I’m quite content to close the book on this season and start on the next winter season. If only the weather would cooperate!

How about you? How do you handle the beautiful nightmare of the shoulder season???

It’s been a while since I’ve posted. My climbing season is winding down (more like, its done) and now its my LEAST favorite time of year. November.

I despise November simply because its generally too damn cold to rock climb and yet, it hasn’t gotten cold enough to ice climb or ski yet. This morning I woke up and despite the pellet stove, it was only 59 degrees in my bedroom upstairs. I’m seriously thinking of seeing if Feathered Friends won’t make me a down snuggie. I love winter, generally, because I love playing in and on the snow & ice, but this brutal cold without the instant gratification of my beloved winter sports, just sucks.

I say all this because maybe I’m just cranky. I’m adult enough to admit it.

So when I watched the video for the Access Fund’s Commit to the Pact project today, I’ve gotta say, I think this was a waste of time and resources.

NOT because protecting climbing access isn’t important to me. It’s extremely important to me. And as I’ve demonstrated above, climbing and being outside are integral parts of my mental health care routine and are probably necessary for the physical safety of those around me. But here’s why I think this campaign misses the mark:

1.) I already do this!!!! Maybe its my trad roots, but this is how I roll whenever I climb. I pack my shit out. Literally. (I’ll never forget summiting Rainier with a FULL blue bag attached to my pack and having to carry it all the way back down to Camp Muir.) At the crag, I am often picking up other people’s trash and packing it out too. I respect designated parking signs, unlike this person…I’m not listening to loud music. I’m not climbing in a big group. I stay on the trails. I respect closures, etc. Since I already do this, what is the point in committing to some sort of pact to do the behaviors I already do? Unless my home cliff is some sort of mythical exception to the rules, this is the way my climbing friends roll too. (Though a few folks could be a little better on the packing-it-out-thang, like when I find someone else’s TP in the woods…..). So it seems silly to me to create a campaign to ask people to commit to doing the things they already do.

2.) The minority of climbers- the ones who need to hear this message and change their behavior, are not going to be impacted by this. Like the person parked next to the No Parking sign above. They don’t care about how their shitty park job might affect other people’s access. They are selfishly thinking of only their needs and desires. “I need a parking space. I can’t find one. I’ll make my own, screw the rules.” Furthermore, this type of person is not exactly open to criticism about their douchey behavior. My hubs, who is a professional guide, is forever telling me stories from the cliff that illustrate this. Like the time he asked two guys not to rappel directly off of a small tree when there was walk off/down climb option less than an 100 feet away. They defended their actions saying that because the tree already had grooves from being rapped off of before, it was OK for them to do the same. *facepalm* Or the dude in the lifted 4×4 who decided it would be a good idea to park half way in the woods simply because he could. He unnecessarily mowed over some brush and sapplings, for what??? When Hubs asked him to simply back up the truck so that it was no longer half in the woods, the owner of said truck started screaming at him that it was none of his damn business where and how he parked.

Those are just two incidents from one month this summer, but similar encounters happen routinely. And they are primarily why I don’t have a lot of hope in the success of the Commit to the Pact campaign.

The campaign features several well-known climbers like Alex Honnold, Tommy Caldwell and even Lynn Hill. The idea is that even for those of us who do already practice Leave No Trace and other ways of minimizing our impact, we can help the cause of maintaining access by encouraging others to ‘do the right thing’ when we see them doing the ‘wrong thing.’ But how is this supposed to work when the wrong-doers are largely not receptive to criticism and feedback that what they are doing is in fact, wrong? How do you teach a selfish person to care about how their actions potentially impact others? Particularly in climbing culture, many of the personalities drawn to climbing are independent types who eschew societal norms to a certain extent. We have a sort of ‘cowboy culture,’ so how are you going to tell that kind of person that they need to conform to a certain ethic?

Does something need to be done about this issue? Definitely. I know that I, for one, am tired of picking up other people’s garbage, seeing trees on the cliff dead or dying because someone couldn’t be bother to walk over to the rap route or shaking my head for the umpteenth time at someone’s douchey park job (Hey folks visiting the Gunks- in case you couldn’t figure it out, those little green things sticking out of the dirt serve to mark out INDIVIDUAL parking spaces, so please stop taking up TWO parking spaces, especially on the weekends!!!) In the end, I do think that campaigns like this one are better than nothing at all, especially if we as the climbing community can learn from the experience and use it to create more effective campaigns in the future. I just wish the donation I make to the Access Fund each month would have been used for something that would have a better chance of fixing the problem.

YOUR TURN! Tell me what you think of the campaign! Do you think it will work? Or is it just preaching to the choir? Do you see these same issues at your home crag as well? Got any ideas for a more effective strategy for dealing with them????

So the ugly truth is that I have had body issues since my early teens. Even uglier, is that that makes me a completely normal adult American woman.

Climbing has been both help and hinderance. By shifting the focus to strength and technique, it has given me a yardstick to measure myself that has nothing to do with the scale and everything to do with the YDS.

On the other hand, strength-to-weight ratio is huge in climbing. Most of the climber chicks I know are tiny. So much so, that I often feel like ‘the fat girl of climbing’ next to most of them. It makes sense- the less weight to lift, the larger the effective finger strength. The problem is that I have used my lack of aptitude for climbing as reinforcing feedback that I’m too fat to climb hard.

The smarter thing to do of course, would be to not buy into that kind of negativity; to be proactive and lose a little fat, but more importantly to train hard. Being a Gunks climber, I can pull strong through overhangs, but also haven’t had to develop a lot of finger strength to pull hard on tiny holds since most overhangs under 5.10 have jugs. In fact, the mental game has been my greatest area of weakness, so I’ve been leading too much on terrain that just isn’t that physically demanding. Though I realize and can articulate all of this, when you have body issues, the voice you hear is not this logical one, its the one saying negative, ugly things. I remember having a conversation with a climbing friend once, bemoaning that I was ‘too fat’ to be able to do a pull-up. He emphatically denied that I was fat, forcing me to concede by saying, “Fine, I have the wrong arm-to-ass ratio!” Interestingly enough, once I began to see the problem as a simple mathematic problem, I started working on getting my arms bigger, doing inverted rows and a few weeks later, got my first full body-weight pull-up.

A similar, subtle transformation has been happening this season as well. Not realizing it, I had been telling myself for years, that I couldn’t lead harder because I’m fat (not because I was a chicken shit, which is more true) and sadly, I believed this. There have been no grand epiphanies here, just shifts in thinking so small, I don’t even know how and where they began. One shift was realizing that my goal is leading 5.8 and 5.9 trad routes, not some thin, overhanging 5.13. I can climb the routes I want to lead on TR just fine, so there is nothing about my body shape or size preventing me from leading them, its totally mental. For some reason though, its easier to think its because of my body than to do the scarier thing of putting my money where my mouth is and taking the sharp end.

I also started expressing gratitude for my body through yoga. More useful than the breathing and stretching was the mental work the teacher had us do to express gratitude in the moment for all that our bodies can do. I started taking this practice with me on hikes, at the gym and on the cliff, offering thanks for my health, strength and mobility.

I also read a lot of books on both mental & physical training for climbing this season and started incorporating what I learned, especially about finger training. I finally realized that if finger strength for small holds is my weakness, than the only way to get better is to train that until I turn it into a strength. My arms weren’t strong enough to do a pull-up, but by training, I over came that and made them strong enough. Finger training could do the same. We put up a hang board in July and I started training on it. Progress is seemingly slow, but I am already starting to see benefits.

The sum of all these subtle shifts is that I am having my best climbing season ever. I’ve made a lot of progress and achieved several long-standing goals. At some point, I stopped telling myself ‘I’m too fat to do that,’ and started reminding myself that ‘everything I want is on the other side of fear.’ That I don’t have to become anorexic to be a better climber, I just have to be willing to lean-in to the fear of pushing myself on lead. I’m also more at peace with my body than I’ve ever been. Yesterday, at the gym, I even cracked a smile as I saw in the mirror just how strong I have become. 🙂

I have been rock climbing now for 15 years. In that time, I have mostly pursued trad climbing. To me, trad climbing is about freedom- freedom to climb anywhere, anytime, no need to have bolts placed for you. (I don’t want to start a trad vs. sport thing with this post, I’m just pointing out how I saw it as new and naïve climber.) Trad climbing was the key to bigger, bolder climbs- the climbs that really captivated my attention, the bigger alpine climbs in the mountains. As a newbie climber, I cut my teeth on and stoked my imagination with the classic stories from the lexicon of mountain literature- stories from ascents in the Himalaya, Alaska, Patagonia, the Alps and the like.

One little snag in my dreams of big adventure in the big mountains- it turns out, that as a climber, I kind of suck. I’m not pushing big numbers. I’m a mediocre climber at best and I get crazy scared on lead, so I’ve never really led anything harder then 5.7. Despite being a sucky climber, I enjoy it well enough to sink most of my free time and way too much of my financial resources into doing it. The best climber in the world is the one having the most fun right? In my opinion, though, this is one of the truly great things about climbing- there are challenges to be had at all levels. At the end of the day, I like to think that what we really respect in our fellow climbers is that they push themselves, not the numbers.

Last summer, I had the opportunity to take on the challenge of Mt. Rainier. Never having done any sort of technical mountaineering before, the mountain would definitely challenge my skill set. I fretted about ‘succeeding’ on the mountain, by which I mean summiting, but finally surrendered that fear and decided I would learn a lot no matter the outcome. I had always assumed Rainier was the sort of climb that I would have to spend a lot of time and energy working up to, learning the ropes on smaller mountains first. So when I stood on the summit that August day with the other two women of my team, the experience was surreal. And addicting.

Gunks goils on top of Rainier, August 2012

Before I even left the Cascades that trip, I knew I wanted to come back, to do more. A whole world had opened up before me. I challenged myself and met that challenge. I found a strength and confidence that I never knew before. Instead of Rainier being a culmination- an end point, it was just the beginning. The mountains were calling me and I had to go. My climbing partner and I talked about logical ‘next step’ climbs. She proposed the Fisher Chimneys route on Mt. Shuksan. She also gave me another invaluable suggestion- why not submit an application for one of the American Alpine Club’s Live you Dream grants?

Folks, I’m here to tell you dreams do come true. I received an email from Sarah Garlick, the Northeast Regional Coordinator for the AAC on Friday afternoon to notify me that I was one of 3 people in the northeast region receiving a Live Your Dream Grant. I cannot tell you how elated and honored I am to be receiving this grant!!! *jumping up and down* I get to go climb Shuksan this summer!!!

Receiving the email filled me with so much gratitude, so I want to take a moment to say a heartfelt thank you to the AAC for sponsoring this wonderful grant program and especially for the Northeast selection committee who wadded through many worthy applications and somehow saw fit to fund my humble little project. (If you’re not an AAC member, you should be!!! If for no other reason then to support awesome stuff like this!) I also want to thank my climbing partner for providing some inspiration for the dream. Her ambition to go after her mountain dreams has definitely inspired me to work to materialize my own as well. I’m also going shout out to all my awesome female climbing partners- you ladies kick axe! The fun I have climbing with you all is a wonderful source of inspiration and a great reminder to simply get out there and enjoy it, whatever “it” might me. And last but not least, I want to thank my DH for all his love, support and understanding when the house is a wreck because I went climbing instead of cleaning J

I got some big news today. HUGE! I am floating on the proverbial cloud 9 and still a bit incredulous that it is really happening to me. I want to tell the whole world, which is why I am blabbing it here.

But not yet.

Because I’m evil like that. OK, not really. I’m not posting yet because well, you probably have a life and are out doing something awesome on a Friday evening (you are doing something awesome, aren’t you???). Hopefully you are doing something way cooler then, I don’t know, ironing socks. Since I am way excited and I want to share my news with everyone, I figure I’ll wait until Monday morning, when you are more likely to be held hostage at work in front of your computer anyway.

I recently came across this little meme on Facebook, posted by Strong is the New Skinny. It really resonated with me because in many ways it sums up how my winter season has gone. Which, in one word, is AWESOME!!!

To begin with, I never considered myself much of an ice climber. I always felt a bit weird on ice, like the movement never flowed. My footwork was terrible and I’d pumped out by the top of 50 ft WI3. Of course, the more pumped I got, the more stressed out I became, the more I over-gripped the tools, etc. We all know this goes nowhere good. So even though I’ve been climbing ice over 8 seasons, climbing 2-3 times a season wasn’t really getting me anywhere.

I can’t even remember how it began, probably one of my climbing partners who prefers ice climbing to rock. Or it could have been getting ditched by my partner on Christmas for a desert climbing trip, but somehow, back in November I got a wild hair to do some training for ice season. I kept it simple- some deadhangs off my front porch on my tools. Then doing some ladder sets of assisted pull-ups off the tools, then doing some endurance-focused stuff, using small feet to pull-up and lock off on the tools while I ‘swung’ them and repeating that movement for as many minutes as I could hold on. I even got lucky enough to do a little dry-tooling at the local gym back in December, while we all sat and waited impatiently for the ice to come in.

The routine was modest, but I kept at it. More curious then anything else to see what, if any, affect it would have on my ice season. From the first day out, I noticed a difference. It wasn’t huge or obvious, but I did notice that I climbed 3 or 4 pitches that day without having a major flame war in my forearms. I took that as a good omen.

My next trip out was pure fun. I went climbing for the weekend with several girlfriends and we had as much fun giggling and laughing as we did ice climbing. The beauty of this experience was that by having such a fun time climbing, I was much more motivated to continue to going out climbing. In fact, this season, I have climbed more then the last 5 years combined and almost all of my days out have been with other ladies. I think that has had a lot to do with having such a great season. Watching them push themselves and succeed is so inspiring and intoxicating, one can’t help but want to push themselves a little bit too. In fact, thanks to those ladies and their incredible energy, I took on one of my first leads on ice. Then my third, fourth and fifth.

I never thought I would lead on ice. For the longest time, I had been content to let others do that, but never thought I would be a strong enough ice climber to pull it off. Turns out, the ice climber I thought I was was no match for the one I really am.

Another thing I never thought I would do happened to me yesterday at the climbing gym. My first full body weight pull-up. I’m still so surprised by it, I have this urge to do pull-ups off of everything now, just because I can. I didn’t intend to do a pull-up that day. I came to the hang board with the intention to simply do some hangs off the open-handed slopers to build some contact strength. For whatever reason, I grabbed the small jugs at one point and began to pull and was shocked when my chin was suddenly level with my hands. I’ve never been able to do an unassisted pull-up before, but then again, I’ve never really worked this hard before. I’ve been running nearly every day and cleaning up my diet in order to lose a few extra pounds that gravity likes to toy with when I’m climbing. I’ve also been doing bodyweight exercises like push-ups and squats. Achieving a pull-up for the first time is validation that the hard work I am doing to optimize my strength to weight ratio for climbing is working. I still have a ways to go, but getting that pull-up is a milestone along the way that just motivates me to keep working hard. It’s also a great reminder that I’m stronger then I think am and that I am more limited by my thoughts then my strength.

I hope to take this lesson with me into the rock climbing season. For awhile now, I have been limited in my leading abilities, mostly by my head. My goal this season though is to take the achievements of ice season to heart and remember in those moments where I am gripped with fear, that I ‘can’ and that the climber I am is stronger then the climber I thought I was.

My partner had sent an early morning text. He wasn’t feeling well and needed to bail on our ice climbing plans for the day. I was secretly glad. The previous day as I waited for him to come pick me up, I had had just enough time to ruminate about the sanity of leaving the safety and comfort of a nice warm bed and house for a day of standing out in the cold freezing my ass off, possibly getting hit by chunks of falling ice and contending with something so terrible it has been dubbed the ‘screaming barfies.’ No wonder the rest of the world seems to cast looks of pity on the ice climber.

So now, with the whole day free, what to do? My initial thought was to go for a run and hit the gym for some plastic pulling. Despite my earlier plan of iceclimbing, I decided that it was too cold to run outside and since today was a major construction day at the gym, it was best to be avoided. I briefly thought about going skiing, but the thought of contending with the weekend crowds and the lack of uninspiring snow pack made me quickly put down that idea too. So I went with my last option: a fuzzy robe, down booties, hot coffee and a copy of Alpinist 40. It was going to be an armchair mountaineer kind of day.

I do the armchair mountaineer thing really well. Too well actually. For me, being an armchair mountaineer means being lazy. Engaging the beauty and freedom of climbing without the weather, without the discomfort and without the risk. It also means giving into my inner gear whore. As I flip through the glossy pages, I see ads for this new boot or that new soft shell hybrid jacket and I buy it. No, I don’t mean that I literally buy it, but I buy what the marketing guru behind that ad is selling, “buy this piece of gear and you too can climb like a badass, just like athlete X, pictured here. All of your dreams of a rockin’ bod and hard sends will come true for a mere $399.99 plus applicable taxes.” So while I do enjoy my armchair mountaineer days on a certain level, I am also disgusted by them. Or more accurately, disgusted with myself and my laziness. At some point in the day, my inner critic will oh-so-lovingly remind me that my climbing dreams won’t be realized through the purchase of a new piece of gear, but through hard work, dedication and commitment to be something other then a fat-ass on the couch in a fuzzy robe with the down booties on.

Today is no different, perhaps even a little worse. I don’t make resolutions but somewhere in January, I got a wild hair and decided to set some goals for myself. I was going to change up my diet and exercise routine (I say ‘change up’ but since I didn’t really have a routine in the first place, that’s a bit disingenuous), lose a few pounds and get a better strength-to-weight ratio going, you know, for climbing of course. Not because I think I’m fat and unattractive and people would like me more if I was skinnier. But that’s a post for another day. No, in my mind, getting a hotter bod means climbing harder will be easier. At least, that’s the motivation I’m using when I really want to eat another chocolate bar. I figure it’s better then pure self-loathing. I also decided to start doing some training. I’ve been climbing for 14 years and never once have I ‘trained’ for climbing. I just go out and do it and have some fun. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. However, one of the things I love about climbing is traveling and the sense of freedom, My sense of freedom with climbing is seriously hampered when I look in the guidebook for a new area I want to visit and realize I can only do about 20% of the climbs because the rest are too hard. So I need to up my game. I’ve been doing some training and I have been seeing some progress. I have to use a magnifying glass, but hey, it’s only early February right? I can’t expect to be crushing 5.13 after only one month of training and while still being on the pudgy side. So, with all theses goals in mind, what do I decide to do with my day? Sit on my ass and essentially do nothing. Nothing that gets me further towards those goals, at least.

But sometimes you need those days, those days of rest. It allows the body to rest and gives space for growth of the mind and heart. And today the Universe decided to give me a little guidance about vulnerability. It started when I came up in this video of Brene Brown’s TED Talk, “The Power of Vulnerability.” You should definitely go watch it, after you’ve finished read my drivel here, of course. She started off trying to study connection, which she ended up understanding more through stories of disconnection, ironically. One of things she found though is that in order to experience connection, we have to be vulnerable.

The problem is, none of us like to feel vulnerable. Whether its pulling a hard move when you’re run out above your last piece or loving someone knowing they might eventually hurt you, vulnerability is scary because it comes with a real risk of being hurt. People use all kinds of things to numb themselves from having to deal with the pain of feeling vulnerable- drugs, addiction, food, and in my case today, simply being lazy. From her research, Brene found that there are basically two categories of people when it comes to dealing with feelings of vulnerability: those who feel worthy and those who don’t. People who don’t feel worthy don’t feel they are enough and so that vulnerability carries with it the heavy weight of shame. These are the people who tend to numb themselves out so they don’t have to feel so vulnerable. The other group, those who do see themselves as worthy- believe they are enough- don’t like being vulnerable anymore then the rest of us, but understand it’s a necessary part of the human experience and are more accepting of it. With the knowledge that they are worthy and they are enough, being in situations where they are vulnerable becomes an opportunity to connect, instead of turn in on themselves and protect. And this place, this place of vulnerability turned into connection, is where love, joy and happiness are rooted.

Back to my armchair mountaineer day, I flip open the copy of Alpinist 40 and started reading Katie Ives’ The Sharp End and came across this:

“’Peering over the edge attunes you to mortality,’ Michael Kennedy says. ‘Climbers have already seen it. It’s not mysterious.’ For the most part, mainstream Western culture shifts the subject of dying into the periphery, where it hovers in the shadowy, almost taboo realm. To discuss it explicitly seems “morbid.” To engage willingly in activities that might incur it, we’re told, is ‘irresponsible.” But there are other hazards that come from losing the awareness of our end: the risk of not experiencing, fully, the raw and urgent joy of life: of not taking conscious responsibility of our brief presence in the world.”

After reading that last sentence, it sounded a lot like what Brene Brown had said in her talk about vulnerability and about how that is where true joy and happiness were forged. In that moment, it occurred to me that that is the true joy of climbing. We willing put ourselves into physically vulnerable situations in order to appreciate and experience true joy. It’s what George Mallory meant when he said, “what we get from this adventure is just sheer joy.” Freezing cold, falling ice, scary run-outs above marginal gear, yes, to the mainstream world we are nut cases. But I’ve never known a group of people who love and experience life so simply and beautifully as climbers do. Now I understand why. And with this understanding, I’m going to make another goal for myself for this year- to be more willing to engage the risk with the knowledge that I am enough. Take on that hard lead that I know I can do, even if it is going to scare the crap out of me. Train harder even if I know its going to hurt a bit before it get better. Stand out in the cold, freezing my butt off, if for no other reason then to know within the depths of my soul that by being vulnerable, I have also proven that I am strong and I can survive. To love myself just the way I am, no matter how hard I climb and to train for harder climbing for the sheer joy of climbing, not the need to prove anything to anyone else.

The summer has been going by so quickly. Since July brought with it the oppressive heat and humidity, I haven’t been climbing as much. Call me a fair-weather climber, but when it’s so hot the rock is sweating, I lose all motivation to climb. Wake me up when it’s fall.

In the meantime, I’ve been preparing for a climbing trip of a different sort. This time next week, I’ll be on a plane, headed for Seattle. Our objective: to climb the Disappointment Clever route on Mount Rainier. Three ladies, no guide. Just us making the decisions for our team, shouldering our own loads, the only ones responsible for our success or failure.

I’ve never been on a glacier before. About ten years ago, when working in Colorado one summer, I did have the opportunity to play around doing some self-arrests on a tiny snowfield. Also while in Colorado I had the opportunity to hike 14,256 feet Long’s Peak. I did OK with the altitude then, but I also had spent the whole summer living and working at 8,000 feet. That is the full extent of big mountain/high altitude experience. In comparison to something like Rainier, it seems laughable.

So Rainier is going to be quite an adventure. A foreign environment, new skills, and unknowns about how my body will perform. Part of me is very excited, part of me is scared to death. I’m looking forward to the challenge, but not sure how I will handle it if I don’t meet it. This is perhaps the most important thing I hope to gain from this trip.

In my climbing, I struggle with remembering to enjoy the journey. I only count myself as having succeeded when I top out the climb, lead the climb or otherwise meet what a general consensus would consider the ‘end point.’ I often get so caught up in chasing numbers and grades, I forget to stop and smell the proverbial roses- to enjoy the journey of climbing.

But as I began to prepare for this trip, I have had Ed Viesturs famous quote, “Getting to the top is optional. Getting down in mandatory” repeated to me on more than one occasion. And it’s a good reminder for me. The summit rate on Rainier is 50%. I have a 50-50 chance of reaching the mythical end goal. If I consider my trip a failure because I didn’t summit, then what was the point? What was the point of taking time off from work, spending all that money, flying to the other side of the country and freezing my butt off? There will be no point.

To justify the sacrifice, I must learn something of value. There certainly is the potential to learn plenty of valuable things- how to travel on a glacier, how to travel as a roped team, how to pace myself for long, hard efforts at altitude, how to feed myself so as to maintain my energy, how to adapt to altitude in a relatively short amount of time, how to go to the bathroom on a glacier. But the real lesson while be if I can learn to value these skills above the value of the summit.

So stay tuned friends, for a report on the my trip, including what I learned along the way.

We booked the tickets Friday night. I wasn’t as excited as I thought I would be. Just that morning, I had seen on Facebook the news story about the park ranger who slipped and fell to his death rescuing 4 climbers who had fallen into a crevasse. More then anything, I felt fear and self-doubt. ‘Why am I spending all this money to potentially end up dead?’ I thought silently, from somewhere in the recesses of my subconscious, so remote I was barely aware of the coherent thought, only the emotion associated with it.

The following day I went rock climbing. We met up in the afternoon and climbed till after dark. As the evening deepened, it was my turn to climb the final pitch through a series of overhangs, the first of which is the biggest. I always struggle with that move, so I don’t quite know why I suggested we do that climb. Belaying from under that first roof, I couldn’t hear my partner yell, “Off belay!” so I had to rely on the movement of the rope. While she pulled all 70 meters of it up, I was still feeding it through my device and yelled back, “That’s me!” when it came taut, hoping she could hear me better then I could hear her. I sat on the ledge and shivered. It had become uncomfortably cool now that the sun had disappeared, but I also shook from the fear. Several tugs on the rope came next as she pulled in the rope. I hoped, rather then knew, that meant I was on belay. I took a deep breath and removed the anchor carefully with one hand, too afraid to let go and risk a misstep that might send me hurtling down the cliff. As I began climbing, the rope moved up the climb with me- a good sign I tried to remind myself. ‘But just in case- DON’T FALL!’ came the response, again from that mysterious subconscious place that was more clearly emotion then a coherent thought.

I climbed smoothly until I reached the roof. I removed the #1 Camalot in the roof and replaced it with my hand and found the secret, solid hand jam that would let me move my body out and around the roof to reach the jug. Too bad grabbing the jug was the easy part. The hardest part of the move for me is getting my feet up on the overhang since I’m not strong enough to campus off the opened handed jug and haul my ass up. I managed to throw a left heel hook up and the tried pull with all my might. My heart was pounding, “don’t fall! don’t fall! don’t fall.” I was stuck for a moment, my hands so wet with sweat they were starting to grease off the crucial juggy hand hold, and all I could do was lament how utterly useless my right leg felt just dangling off into space, doing nothing useful to propel me out of this predicament, but instead feeling like the darkness had grabbed ahold of it and was pulling me down, down, down into the eternal abyss. ‘Why do I do this to myself?’ I whined.

The adrenaline gave me enough of a boost to finally struggle up and over that horrid roof. As soon as I pulled both of my feet up and was again standing on them, the potent mix of fear & adrenaline became counterproductive and I noticed an odd sensation in my stomach- I wanted to hurl. Three pitches off the deck in the dark- god, I hope no one was standing below. I briefly thought of the parties that would do this climb the following day, would pull the classic roof only to recoil in disgust when they found my vomit all over the rock. But before I could actually hurl, the feeling subsided and I was able to take a few breaths and move on. There was now only one way to safety- keep climbing to the top.

The next day I tried to go climbing again. My nerves were so frayed from the experience of the night before that I felt physically exhausted all day. I could barely muster the energy to do anything. When I tried to lead a pitch that I’ve done many times before, I could barely keep it together. I climbed up & down several times, balking at doing one little move that felt too far out from the gear 2 feet to my right. I ended up shoving a few crappy cams in on the route above, too anxious to relax, find a good stance and place a good piece.

All this fear and frayed nerves prompted some intense self-reflection. I have dreams of big adventures and big mountains, but how to accomplish this when it turns out that I am a big chicken-shit? Even the smallest things that most climbers seem to do with ease- like anchoring in at a hanging belay, can send me up to the edge of having a panic attack. I so desperately want to lead harder climbs so that I can travel and do bigger routes in the mountains, but I nearly wet myself thinking about pulling through the roofs on some of the classic 5.6 climbs. It’s a question that I wrestle with perpetually in my climbing- is there a place in climbing for the risk-averse people with a fear of heights?

I love three day weekends. It gives me a little extra time to do a slightly bigger adventure- something usually involving a road trip of sorts. So three days before the long Memorial Day weekend, I got it in my head to go do the Presidential Traverse in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Clocking in at over 22 miles in length and over 10,000 feet of accumulated elevation gain, the “Presi Traverse” follows an alpine ridge line that summits the 7 of the highest peaks east of the Mississippi, including the mythic Mount Washington, home of the “world’s worst weather.”

I was lucky in that my partner for this scheme is fairly strong physically, but more importantly, is not easily intimidated. When I first mentioned the trip to New Hampshire, I suggested we go hike Mt. Washington as training for summit attempts on Rainier later this summer. Talking him into going for the whole Presi Traverse instead was easy- like taking candy from a baby.

It seemed that some of my friends may have thought I was acting rashly- planning such a big hike in so little time to think it all the way through. I got questioning looks and not a few, ‘are you sure you’re not biting off more than you can chew?’ comments when I divulged this plan. I understand that these people love and care about me, didn’t want to see me get hurt and were really just trying to intervene in my own interest of safety, but their questions began to raise questions in my own head. I went from confidently thinking, ‘I can do this’ to anxiously pouring over the ‘what ifs.’

I know in climbing and the outdoors that considering the what ifs is what often helps keep us alive to climb another day. But there can also come a point where one reaches “paralysis through over-analysis” where consideration of the what-ifs becomes too great and squelches any and all action before it even happens. This is my problem. I have been raised to be a scaredy-cat. I come from a long line of professional worriers. In climbing I find that most of my frustrations comes from the reasonable risks I’m too afraid to take, rather then the unreasonable risks I thoughtlessly take.

I am actively working on transforming my relationship with these reasonable risks in both climbing and my life in general. From what I have learned so far, the key ingredient appears to be confidence. If I am confident and know that I can lead a 5.8 route, then I can do it. If I am confident and know that I can pull off a 22+ hike over some of the toughest terrain in the East, then I can do it. This is one of the things I love so much about traveling in the mountains; its such an opportunity to learn about one’s self and to gain confidence from your successes as well as important lessons from your failures.

We successfully executed the Traverse this weekend. By the end, we were tired and spent and my feet felt like raw hamburger meat, tenderized by the miles and miles of talus. I knew there would be pain involved. But I also knew there would be success.